by Maria Mutch
“Anyone I might know?” There was the gold tooth again.
“That depends. Know any dancers?”
“Depends on the kind of dancing.”
She raised her glass to him. Then drained it. She left her money on the bar and stopped momentarily to watch the tank. The large television behind the bar was reflected in its glass. Headlines rolled by underneath the fish, calamities of displacement, versions of being missing. Lost things. Wars and countries and children.
A Neuron Containing Sabine
I can’t approach it. It’s like looking at the sun. I don’t mind the hyperbolic. What has to be remembered is that I had never met another Orphan, capital O. I had been in that circle, that empty pool, alone.
* * *
We lay on our sides in bed, facing the same direction. The mind had had an idea, and the body had gone along with it. I moved her long hair out of the way and drew a map over her back, her shoulder blades, and tried to locate myself.
“You are here,” Sabine said, and breathed deeply.
“Am I?” I said. Perhaps I was already backing out. Whatever the computations and calculations, an error had been made. It was, perhaps, too early for judgment, for the fun and games of coming apart. I held the metaphorical seam ripper and began my work, but a shiver in the postcoital haze made me pause. The spine, in the end, seems so vulnerable, a thread that believes itself protected and ends in that tumult called the brain. She murmured in her half sleep, and I rested my hand on her hip. I stroked, slowly, her lower back, her ass.
“You must wake up,” I whispered.
“Why? Let me sleep.” She reached behind her, took my hand, and moved my arm so that I clasped her stomach. When she was breathing deeply again, I extracted my arm and lay on my back. The ceiling of her bedroom was translucent and then transparent, I felt, and I could see upward into the apartment above and the ones above that, all the way to the top of the building. And if I looked over the edge of the bed, I could peer down into the lower apartments in exactly the same way, people on top of people on top of people, in their beds and chairs and making their toast and pouring their coffee, arguing over the television station or the sour milk of the blinkering refrigerator. The season wasn’t summer but the dead of winter, and when we put our clothes on, we would be dressed for arctic conditions.
“Wake up,” I said.
“Wake up, Molly,” she murmured, and I sighed, and it is possible that I went to sleep.
Sabine
She rode the elevator back up to her room on the fifth floor. She had the sense of being followed, but when she turned the hallway was empty. Nothing except the one tray on the floor outside a room. It held a steel carafe and white napkins that hid a mound of things. Jam packets peeled back and partially eaten. The nude crust of a pale toast suggesting teeth and tongue and the habit of leaving something behind. Proof of life. She picked up one of the jam packets and sniffed it, then ate the contents. She considered the crust, and ate the buttery end of it. She could not have explained herself, except to say that the conditions for eating the remnants of a stranger’s breakfast had been right. She wondered if her brother, wherever he was, was hungry. If there was something he wanted, if there was an empty space he needed to fill.
* * *
She slid her key card into the lock and waited for the light to turn green. She dawdled. She wanted to be followed, to be searched for and found, which she didn’t think was sinister. She realized that she was still wearing her coat, that her big boots clomped when she walked. Her hair was dark, long, and loose. A mess, in fact. She supposed that she was the one who might seem sinister, what her mother or her father would have called “a fright” when she was a child. She stood looking at the door’s peephole. An alive portal, brass trimmed and lustrous as a fish eye. But there was nothing to see, so she opened the door at last and went in.
* * *
She lay on the bed and turned on the television. She checked her phone and found three voicemails, two from Ellena:
“You there yet, luv? Miss you already. Beezely and Mr. Man miss you, too. Don’t you? Yes, you do! I know you do! Ha ha—lots of wagging. Okay, talk to you later.”
And “Hey, baby, do you know where the fucking corkscrew is? Why do we only have one of those? Note to self: pick up corkscrew. Let me know, yeah? Not that I’m drinking without you. Ha ha—okay, love you! Talk soon.”
The other was from someone who said they didn’t have Molly’s number or address. She made a note of it in her journal, as if she were an organized person, but she was not. The process, whatever it was, slipped through her fingers. She was not someone of contacts and answers. Her trips to Seth’s apartment had so far been aimless, aside from the simple desire to be among his things. Other people with missing relatives were focused and driven. They were on ceaseless hunts; they formed task forces; they sought witnesses. Moreover, they seemed to possess an unflagging belief in the person’s aliveness. She had no particular fidelity to a theory, though it seemed to her more likely that, if she could not phrase it another way, he no longer was. And yet she felt him, maybe more so than ever, as if a part of him had grown while his material presence had shrunk. She kept a file of the related paperwork, the bureaucracy of being gone, but she could barely stand to look at it. Her brother had been reduced to some ambiguous notes, copies of forms that featured his name, and reminders to herself to pay some of his bills. She wondered what Molly would say, and she wondered, too, if Molly would care. Ten years had passed.
* * *
She called Ellena, who didn’t pick up, so she left a message. “At the hotel. Love you, El. Uh, don’t bother calling back. Gonna sleep.” She texted her: Corkscrew in bathroom closet. On account of wine in tub. Sorry.
She flipped through the channels on the television, looking for something that would tell her how to proceed. She had become interested in documentaries about missing people. Ellena had said two days ago, “I mean, I get it. I do. He’s your goddamn brother, after all. So, not criticizing, right? I just wonder if it’s, you know, good for you. To watch so many of them …”
True enough. Only the night before, still at home with the dogs at her feet, she had found one about people who had gone missing on federal lands. All those national parks, it turned out, swallowed the occasional person. Often they were never found, no body to send home and bury. Sometimes a rescue happened, or sometimes the victim found their own way. They emerged from the trees, from the caves, from the fog, now a ragged creature with a feral look in their eye, permanently astonished. She tried to imagine which of these circumstances belonged to Seth, whether he was the never-found, the body brought home, or the astounded.
The documentary she found contained the story of a boy who went missing on a family camping trip. When his parents were occupied, he drifted up a steep embankment not far from them and disappeared into the waiting forest. A frantic search was conducted, eventually involving the police and many of the locals, which turned up nothing. A few days afterward, the boy emerged from the trees, naked and carrying his own clothes. In the documentary, the boy was now a man. He showed his clothing to the camera, unfolding from a neat stack the exact striped T-shirt and pair of shorts he had worn on that day, and a little pair of shoes. He regarded the camera with a placid expression, unable to illuminate the mystery. He remembered nothing, he said, about his time in the woods. Nothing about the essential character of being missing, who or what he saw or what he did. The boy he’d been was also missing for him. The boy with his name had emerged from the forest and approached a speechless member of the search party. He still had the clothing, which he held tenderly, evidence that he had once been that boy. But the tiny clothes that he could hold in his hands seemed to suggest that he should know.
* * *
She turned off the television. The problem with it was the lack of static, the way that the stations were continually on, never stopping. She missed the snowy static of childhood, which took over at night after the stat
ions had signed off. The sound was waves or traffic or wind or breathing, and conveyed that it had travelled a long way to deliver its message. Even if the knowledge wouldn’t stay, she had once regarded it, and it had regarded her.
She decided on the clock radio, which was small and black with its cord threaded through a small hole in the bedside table. The time on it incorrectly said 2:54 a.m., but she didn’t mind. She scanned until she could hear the aliveness of static. She pulled on the clock radio so that its cord stretched out and she laid down on the bed with it, placing it on her chest. Still wearing her coat, she fell asleep this way.
The Documentary
A man has been looking for his missing brother every day over the course of a year, rushing from his small apartment when he gets word about a sighting. His apartment is dim, and he has lined two walls with maps, the fliers he has created over the last months, notes about possible sightings, and photos of his brother. The coffee table is home to a photocopier, cracker boxes, and soda cans; mugs with his brother’s face on them; and the results of tarot card readings. He regularly consults his computer, which is set up in a central position near a window with the shade pulled down, and scans for evidence.
He occasionally receives emails from strangers with attached photos that arrive grainy or shadowy, of a figure half-formed or half-glimpsed. The messages sometimes contain footage from a store’s video camera, with a similar result: the figure in question walks among other figures, joltingly and blurred. He often can’t discern gender or race or age, let alone know if the person is his brother. The only fact is that the figures are human. Though he has begun to question even this—who knows the true material substance of some moving pixels and grains and the colour grey?
On occasion a stranger will write him with a remembered detail, how they saw someone matching his brother’s description, they’re sure of it, but when he contacts them they often back away from their assertions. Maybe they know something, maybe they don’t. He lives in this unstable territory, one that is just becoming or gaining clarity, or is actively trying to disappear. Whichever it is, the territory contains shadows and doubt and the mood of objects whose usefulness has been depleted. Dead things. Then someone calls and he is out the door, and feeling the rush of energy that could be mistaken for progress. He has done this many times before, leapt into his compact car with his phone glowing beside him, telling him the way.
With his hands gripping the steering wheel, he says to the person in the car with him, the one filming, “When I’m driving around, I look at everyone. So I do a lot of driving. And hoping. I can’t stop myself.”
The world he once barely noticed has become so noticeable that he can’t keep up. The effect is not unlike seeing the blurred photos and videos. His brain works to test the remembered image of his brother against the people walking along the sidewalks, the hordes of them. Does he see one who looks particularly lonely, or hunched, or moves his large frame slowly, as if he is lost / not lost? When the man gives out fliers, he tells people, gesturing with his hands, drawing a shape in the air, that his brother is big, bigger than me, a bit hefty—tall. You can’t miss him.
* * *
You can’t miss him.
The Sidewalk
Oh, it’s brilliant. Begin there, not with the sun, which is missing, and not this piece of sidewalk with its glinting bits of ice and salt, and not the strange faces peering over her, but with the snow crystal two storeys up. That small bit of electricity, which shines. But people are looking down because of her, and they don’t look up.
They have already made assumptions about her, and one is that her mind isn’t here, she is insensate and doesn’t see them crowding around her, blocking her view. They don’t know that she watches, anyway, beyond their heavy coats and hatted heads, the single drifting snowflake that is two storeys up. The building behind it is the colour of the seamless cloud-filled sky, so there are layers of absence. A storm is coming, and it will heap four feet of snow on a city famous for its ability to absorb terrible things. But for now the sky, a glowing grey wash behind the angles of rooftops, has vanished.
Even if the people can’t believe their eyes, this is not new to her. She prefers the old term grand mal, more than the rhyme-y tonic-clonic, as she likes the aptness—the big bad—and its literal grandness. She is, after all, experiencing a head-to-toe relinquishment, something almost lavish, if unwanted. She has another, more subtle mode in her repertoire, originating in her temporal lobe, called the absence seizure, pronounced the French way. Conversation stops, she seems to drift away, makes a gesture maybe, and then returns. A moment of absence, but she knows the absence is contained more in the witness. If anyone asked her where she goes during her abductions, they wouldn’t get a satisfactory answer.
She has a theory that turbulence in the atmosphere causes headaches to swell to the top of her skull and her balance—normally so well-tuned—to falter. She starts to sweat easily. Her doctor has said to her that she is imagining it, that it is an anxiety attack and that is why she feels those things, but she has concluded otherwise. They have long disagreed about her symptoms and what she considers to be her triggers. He can’t know everything about her brain. She knows that electricity comes for her from the cloud formations roiling over the sea, that her seizures begin in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, right in its steel-coloured mind. Neurons organize themselves in great surges of communication, forces of an unseen world. It is a felt thing, a shimmer in the viscera that builds, grows spikes and speed. The beginnings of falling down.
* * *
This bit of sidewalk is now a territory that belongs to her, and a better spot than, say, a subway platform, with its oiliness that is part machine, part sebum, a distillation of millions of people and their metal counterparts. You can scrub for days and still feel it mining the skin. Better, too, than stairs, and the tension in those angles, the way they calibrate gravity and measure it. They declare the only way is down. Boom. A body can be flung. Transformed. Another dimension ruptured. There is the patient long ago who said to the English neurologist John Hughlings Jackson, “I feel in some strange place.” The landing comes, a bursting through to a new territory, familiar and not.
* * *
The boy is there, at the edge of this portal. He has never encountered a woman whose body appears to be opening and closing. Her face has a grimace that reminds him of the faces he has recently seen, photographs of mummified humans emerging from ice floes with their ancient, constricted grins. She seems tall, even though she’s on the ground, with a shock of white-blond hair, short and wild. The connotation of lightning.
I am lightning. I have lightning. I hold it here in my head. As if the words are right there in his own mind. Her hair fascinates him as much as her condition, because the strands have been spiked with paste and teased up, a detonation from her scalp. He wonders who the shaking woman is, what her name could be.
* * *
It’s Molly. But they could not have gotten her more wrong, she wishes to say. The trouble seems to reside in that -ly and which she thinks is not quite the right fit. Fit. See there, she can’t escape the connections; they spin out to eternity. He smiles at her, he enjoys this game. But he glimpses something that later on he won’t like to remember, a space or a colour that makes him frown and draw back through the crowd. His mother, if she were here, would catch his arm, feeling sorry that he has seen this, the fallen woman, and pull him to the side so they could bypass the scene on the ground. He hasn’t spoken since the age of five, but he tilts his head back to look at something no one else can see and says the single word location.
* * *
Location, they say, is everything. The proximity of thing to thing, person to person. But see also the impossibility of locating. A person can disappear in the city with ease. She is more indelible than ever, but she had been looking for someone, hadn’t she? The last few days are themselves hard to locate—the thoughts she had been absorbed in, who she had been with, ha
d dinner with. She had been working on a performance.
The city knows who you are, however. It assumes people at every corner, and wakefulness and continuity and never sleeping. It knows you’re there, emitting your carbon dioxide and hot breath. You can’t hide from the city, but it can perform the neat trick of hiding you, if you so desire. It can drink you down, provide a cloak, make you entirely ungraspable, almost as if you had never been here in the first place.
* * *
The irony of the most dramatic episodes occurring in public isn’t lost on her, and occasionally it has happened, though not for some years and not on a downtown street; not on a sidewalk. She had her first one at age thirteen, a year after her parents and the house. She once seized in a library, in the section of narwhals and porpoises, and opened her eyes to silent rows of blue spines. Two years later she was overcome waiting for a subway during rush hour. The congestion of people appeared to collapse over her in waves—the faces and hands and iterations of boots. It becomes easy, then, to appreciate the invisible, the efficacy of a secret.
Sabine
Sabine drove the rest of the way with focus, sometimes speeding. There was the matter of what to do with the car, the difficulty of parking. She had the feeling that if she took Seth’s spot at the building’s lot, it would somehow, inexplicably, prevent him from coming back. She decided to leave the car at a railway station on the outskirts and take the train the rest of the way in. By late morning the city had grown up around her, frigid and steaming and pulsing with people. She proceeded then to bypass the subways and taxis and instead walk with her bag the entire twenty-two blocks to his building along streets that were icy in places and wet in others. She wanted to dislike the smells, the urine puddles, the padded people, the rushing, but in truth she felt perhaps more at home here than anywhere. She had been surrounded by this place for the better part of her life. Before she left and said she wouldn’t come back.
